Olga Tokarczuk
Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk is a Polish writer, psychologist, screenwriter, poet, and essayist who works in the Polish language.
Born on 29 January 1962 in Sulechów, Poland, Tokarczuk was educated at the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Warsaw. She has carried both that psychological formation and her literary practice throughout her career, working across fiction, poetry, the essay, and the screenplay.
Her notable works include Primeval and Other Times, Flights, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, and The Books of Jacob. Among the honors she has received are the Nike Award, Poland's literary prize, the Man Booker International Prize in 2018, and the Nobel Prize in Literature. These distinctions place her among the most formally recognized writers working in Polish.
Tokarczuk's range of occupations — psychology, poetry, the essay, fiction, the screenplay — marks a practice that does not confine itself to a single form or register. Her body of work, spanning the four notable titles identified here, has drawn recognition at both the national level, through the Nike Award, and the international level, through the Man Booker International Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature, the latter among the most significant honors available to any writer.
Quotes by Olga Tokarczuk
Olga Tokarczuk's insights on:
State television, from which a significant number of Poles get their news, consistently smears, in aggressive and defamatory language, the political opposition and anyone who thinks differently from the ruling party.
In a certain sense we can be proud to have introduced this hairstyle to Europe. 'Plica polonica' should be added to the list of our inventions, alongside crude oil, pierogi and vodka.
I decided to write a crime novel. That genre was at the height of its popularity in Poland, so I thought it might earn me a bit of cash to go on with my work on 'The Books of Jacob.' I shut myself away for a few months and devoted myself entirely to 'Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.'
Reading English novels I always adore the ability to write without fear about inner psychological things that are so delicate.
I like to come back to the science fiction of Stanislaw Lem. He is comforting but also funny, and although I know his books, there's always something new to discover.
My books are not 'political.' I don't make political demands. They actually describe life. But when we look at human life, politics creeps in everywhere.
Anglo-Saxons have a view that history is ordered and chronological, and I think that fed into the development of the realist middle-class novel. You know, the ones you read on your sofa with a nice cup of tea.
The first photograph I ever experienced consciously is a picture of my mother from before she gave birth to me. Unfortunately, it's a black-and-white photograph, which means that many of the details have been lost, turning into nothing but gray shapes.